In March 2023, Lebanon accidentally became a global news story about timekeeping.
The caretaker government announced, less than a week before the scheduled clock change, that daylight saving time would be delayed by a month. The stated reason was to ease the burden on Lebanese Muslims observing Ramadan, as an earlier sunrise would mean a shorter fasting day.
Christian communities rejected the decision. Churches announced they would change their clocks on the original schedule. Schools split: some changed, some didn’t. Businesses, already operating in a country suffering severe economic crisis, power outages, and political paralysis, had to advertise which clock they were using. “We open at 9am (new time)” appeared alongside “9am (old time).”
For about a week, Lebanon was functionally running two parallel times. It was briefly comic, globally mocked, and also a precise mirror of the country’s deeper political fractures.
Eastern European Time, technically
Lebanon’s official timezone is Asia/Beirut, which follows Eastern European Time: UTC+2 in winter, UTC+3 in summer (EEST). The country is on the same offset as Greece, Romania, and Finland, a geographic quirk of the official timezone boundaries.
After the 2023 confusion, the government reversed the decision and aligned on the standard European schedule. But the episode revealed how fragile the consensus around a shared clock can be in a country where political and sectarian divisions run through almost everything.
Beirut as temporal palimpsest
Beirut is a city where architectural time periods layer directly on top of each other. Roman columns stand beside Ottoman-era buildings, which stand beside French Mandate-period structures, which stand beside 1970s concrete apartments with bullet holes, which stand beside gleaming post-war reconstruction towers. The city was largely destroyed during the 1975-1990 civil war and rebuilt from the 1990s onward.
The massive explosion on August 4, 2020, when approximately 2,750 tons of improperly stored ammonium nitrate detonated at the port, killed over 200 people, injured more than 6,000, and destroyed large parts of the city. The precise moment, 6:07pm local time (UTC+3 in summer), is seared into Lebanese memory. Clocks in destroyed buildings froze at that hour. Photos circulated for weeks of stopped watches and shattered clocks.
Time marked the disaster literally.
The political mechanics of clock-setting
Lebanon’s government structure is built on sectarian power-sharing: the president must be Maronite Christian, the prime minister Sunni Muslim, and the parliamentary speaker Shia Muslim. This formula, established in the 1943 National Pact, distributes power across communities but creates a governance system where almost nothing can be done without cross-sectarian consensus.
Setting clocks is normally a bureaucratic non-event. That it became a crisis in 2023 reflects the degree to which Ramadan’s relationship to civil time had become a proxy for a deeper argument about whose calendar should govern shared public space.
Other countries have navigated this: Jordan permanently moved to UTC+3 partly to avoid DST disrupting prayer schedules. Morocco pauses DST during Ramadan each year by formal policy. Lebanon’s version was distinguished by its disorder: a last-minute announcement, followed by community refusal, followed by reversal.
Cedar time
Lebanon’s national symbol is the Cedar of Lebanon, a tree that can live for more than 3,000 years. The famous Cedars of God grove near Bsharri includes trees estimated at 1,500 to 2,000 years old. They were there before the Arab conquests, before the Crusades, before the Ottoman Empire. They are still there.
A country with 3,000-year-old trees on its emblem running two different times simultaneously for a week is either deeply ironic or deeply Lebanese. Possibly both.
